What are you on about? You can see clearly in some shots that the book only has a few pages and the rest are just white. Watch it again. You can also see that nobody in any of the shots is reading a page past the first 8 or so.

The retailers know it's for The Apprentice and that it's been created in 2 days.

That's exactly what I said to my husband



It made me laugh as well


Yes it certainly was


I still don't believe that, that could be achieved in 2 days


I really miss not contributing live and don't like the 8 o'clock spot as I can't watch it then so I have to record it

Certainly the "mostly girls" sub team in charge of coming up with the recipes only came up with three dishes. Stephen says so here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01nw78v//?t=37m34s

of course the other sub team may have added a few as well.

It was also mentioned in passing that one of the orders was dependant on the addition of other healthier receipes

I've scanned through the episode with my Sky box to try to locate the shots you are referring to. Point me to any part of the episode where you are explicitly shown loads of open, blank pages in the book and I'll happily concede your point. Viewers may conclude that their book contains many blank pages, but, unless I'm mistaken, these pages are not actually shown to you, like you suggest.

What exactly are you trying to say the 50 or so pages are filled with?

There is no way the teams created even close to 15 recipes.

Oh and I'm so sorry I made a solitary spelling mistake in my last post which you so eloquently picked up on.
I wasn't using spell-check and if my post was going to be published and sold as a publication, I would have proof-read it over and over again. As it was a post on a forum, I decided not to double-check it.

I didn't see any white pages as such, at least I don't remember any.

I did notice there were two versions of the book. One where you see all the pages (which could well just be the three recipes they mentioned), the other full thickness looking like a couple of hundred pages that they kept shots to the front pages.

It is noticeable that whilst the paper of the books is coloured, the edges of the fat book are white, which does give the impression that it's a "this is what the final version will look like" and the smaller books are content examples

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01nw78v/?t=22m27s

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01nw78v/?t=22m46s

Same as what I saw. Earlier in the ep, you could see their book was thin, and in the boardroom you could see it had 'thickened up' but I've yet to see any shots which explicitly reveal that the book is largely filled up with blank pages, as others are talking about

That's a different point. It's one thing for people to assume that a large chunk of their book is just blank pages, but there has been an assertion that there are shots in the episode which show these blank pages. I've yet to see these shots.

You did not make a solitary spelling mistake, you made a solitary grammatical error.

Whether they had blank pages or not, the kids have not actually written any recipe books.

The text is either prewritten, or a load of lorem ipsum.

I don't understand what this argument has been about.

Anyone who has watched The Apprentice knows that the 'products' they 'sell' to the high street/online stores or whoever are not real and they are not real orders. They are simply a task which replicates the process in the 'real world', but no such product exists in the real world. I am bewildered as to why anyone should think these things are really for sale! The only exceptions have been, for example, the phone apps from last series which were put on sale for 24 hours in a 'real world' context in order to gauge which team would win the task.

There have also been some instances where unreal products have been made real in the real world - Phil's Bodyrocker is one example - but they are very few and far between and took (if I recall) at least two years to make real.

The recipe books were not for sale in the real world and did not exist. The buyers were placing virtual orders 'as if it was the real world' but the orders were not real. The cook books themselves did not, and do not, exist in reality - they were simply representative of a 'real world' task that might be applied to one area of business.

Quite clearly - and this was shown several times - the 'recipes' the contestants produced only took up a few pages. However, they needed an 'as real' representation of a longer recipe book to take to the buyers to make the task look more authentic, hence the thicker-looking books they took with them with the finished covers. However, whether or not the remaining pages were blank or not, or covered in cartoons, or someone's personal diary entries for that week (yes, I'm being facetious) is irrelevant - the remaining pages DID NOT have any recipes in them!

This was just a 'representative of the real world' task, but it was not real. There is a difference, but only one poster seems to have a problem understanding that. Instead they have a bee in their bonnet about what is on the remaining pages of the 'apparent' book we saw in the episode! Talk about totally missing the point, lol!

It was an assumption. I assumed that the remaining pages were blank. I don't care if they're filled with cartoons or random text or whatever. Its irrelevant to the point that I was trying to make.
My point is, when pitching to retailers, all they are going to care about are the recipes and it was made clear to us, the audience that each team made three recipes. So therefore, the three girls only had to proof-read three recipes and that is why I was annoyed at the mistake - it was an incredibly basic one and one that could have been avoided had Amy, Alice and Ashleigh bothered to proof-read the recipes properly.

OK, well, I apologise for the grammatical error then.

Check at 39.10, 38.10 and especially 39.25 and 38.51 for Karen flipping through what is obviously the equivalent book which only has 3 spreads. Paper thin.

38.08 for the first few pages of Lord Sugars book being coloured, the rest not.

This is so obvious anyway; we all know you're simply trolling. Enough.

As I said in my previous post when I posted the 'Ode to a spellchecker', proof-reading is a dying skill in schools - as 'traditional' English teacher I am in despair at the low standards these days, but put very simply a huge proportion of today's GCSE English Language courses do not demand anything in the way of accurate spelling and grammar (they are not even marked on it in over 50% of the total amount of papers they sit to pass it!) which is giving awful mixed messages to students, and makes proof-reading seem irrelevant when it is anything but.

For the record, I insist my students do proof-read, and I encourage correct spelling and grammar/punctuation at all times, not just 'when required' by the exam board!

I don't know if it's still worth discussing, but it's common to produce a dummy book for pitching or promotional purposes. It's the most expensive way to pitch a book, but it does exist.

A dummy usually consists a designed cover with a working title and 8 or 12 pages (1 sheet = 2 or 4 pages, depending on the book size) of title page, first chapter and placeholders for illustrations or photograph). The rest of the book would be blank. A rush/overnight job would produce 10 copies of the dummy, which is eyewateringly expensive as each copy would cost around £30.

It's impossible to compile recipes, write copy and do copy-edit, cover design, text design, layout design, typeset and print a 54-page book in two days. It's literally impossible.

They were selling a concept so thats all you need. A theme, a title, a cover, 3 recipe's as examples and one of them to eat to prove the concept is edible. You then have a presentation as a test of teh concept and their ability to present. As you say no one could come up with large numbers of new recipe's in 2 days or even copy them from someone elses cookbook.

On the US version of the Apprentice, they did sell real products. Maybe it was because there was a sponsorship deal with every episode, but if the product was good then it appeared on the shelves and if it wasn't, then neither team would win.

Maybe it would be a bit much for Young Apprentice, but it would be great to add that extra element of reality to it. (Especially as products could be tinkered with for the X months between filming and broadcast)

Of course they sell real products in some tasks - like the one where they have to represent a manufacturer and sell their products (like the over-50s task last year). It just isn't feasible to do that with a product they've created themselves. The orders are often into the hundreds, who is going to spend time and effort making that volume of product just for a reality show order?

Yeah, its the design tasks and product selection tasks which confuse people. For example, the big retailer didn't really buy 100,000 bags of La Popcorn last series, just like Mothercare didn't actually buy £99,000 worth of Baby Glows in Series 6.

Just got back from a few days away.

I'm not trolling at all, and I don't care for the accusation.

I've looked at these points in the episode. There are no explicit shots of 'blank' pages, which means all anyone can do is assume. We're all in danger of endlessly going round in circles, so let's agree to park this one.